Everyone ignores the involvement of Kushner's father. his arrest and imprisonment.
“My dad’s arrest made me realize I didn’t want to be a prosecutor anymore,” Kushner explained. “The law is so nuanced. If you’re convicting murderers, it’s one thing. It’s often fairly clear. When you get into things like white-collar crime, there are often a lot of nuances. Seeing my father’s situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him. I just never wanted to be on the other side of that and cause pain to the families I was doing that to, whether right or wrong. The moral weight of that was probably a bit more than I could carry.”
Kushner’s appointment as CEO came a year after the company’s biggest-ever deal, the $1.8 billion acquisition of 666 Fifth Avenue. The firm had bought the 1.45-million-square-foot office tower at the height of the market, and then watched as its value plummeted when the recession hit. By 2008, the cash flow was only covering 69 percent of the building’s debt service. Lenders were banging on Kushner’s door.
“He had to grow up really fast,” Mike Fascitelli, the former CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, which eventually came in as a partner on the building, told TRD. “The five years [following his father’s arrest] were like dog years. He might have been young going in, but he came out an adult.”
To rescue the building from impending default, Kushner employed an ambitious strategy: he bifurcated the building’s retail and office components and sold a 49 percent stake in the retail to the Carlyle Group and Crown Acquisitions for $525 million.